The authors propose a new efficient automatic verification technique, Athena, for security protocol analysis. It uses a new efficient representation - the extension to the Strand Space Model, and utilizes techniques from both model checking and theorem proving approaches. Athena is fully automatic and is able to prove the correctness of many security protocols with arbitrary number of concurrent runs. The run time for a typical protocol from the literature, like the Needham-Schroeder protocol, is often a fraction of a second. Athena exploits several different techniques that enable it to analyze infinite sets of protocol runs and achieve such efficiency